The Best Quotes by Famous Author Ernest Hemingway

Ernest MillerHemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Let's see the famous quotes of Ernest Hemingway.

3. There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.

– Ernest Hemingway

4. [What is the definition of guts?] Grace under pressure.

– Ernest Hemingway

5. An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

– Ernest Hemingway

6. In order to write about life, first you must live it!

– Ernest Hemingway

7. There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

– Ernest Hemingway

8. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

– Ernest Hemingway

9. But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason.

– Ernest Hemingway

10. Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.

– Ernest Hemingway

11. The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

– Ernest Hemingway

12. Time is the least thing we have.

– Ernest Hemingway

13. Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports. . . all others are games.

– Ernest Hemingway

14. America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

– Ernest Hemingway

15. Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .

– Ernest Hemingway

16. If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.

– Ernest Hemingway

17. You lose it if you talk about it.

– Ernest Hemingway

18. Never confuse movement with action.

– Ernest Hemingway

19. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

– Ernest Hemingway

20. I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

– Ernest Hemingway

21. To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

– Ernest Hemingway

22. 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part.

– Ernest Hemingway

23. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

– Ernest Hemingway

24. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

– Ernest Hemingway

25. The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.

– Ernest Hemingway

26. But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

– Ernest Hemingway

27. 'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood.

– Ernest Hemingway

28. Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

– Ernest Hemingway

29. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

– Ernest Hemingway

30. Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.

– Ernest Hemingway

31. But did thee feel the earth move?

– Ernest Hemingway

32. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

– Ernest Hemingway

33. Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

– Ernest Hemingway

34. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

– Ernest Hemingway

35. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try…

– Ernest Hemingway

36. Grace under Pressure.

– Ernest Hemingway

37. I know now that there is no one thing that is true -- it is all true.

– Ernest Hemingway

38. I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

– Ernest Hemingway

39. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

– Ernest Hemingway

40. Live life to the fullest.

– Ernest Hemingway

41. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

– Ernest Hemingway

42. Never mistake motion for action.

– Ernest Hemingway

43. Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

– Ernest Hemingway

44. So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

– Ernest Hemingway

45. The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

– Ernest Hemingway

46. The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

– Ernest Hemingway

47. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places…

– Ernest Hemingway

48. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly in the only heritage he has to leave.

– Ernest Hemingway

49. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

– Ernest Hemingway

50. When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.

– Ernest Hemingway

51. When you have a child, the world has a hostage.

– Ernest Hemingway

52. Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.